Russian market for mobile applications for business and the public sector Overview TAdviser 2023

Firstly, to minimize the possible sanction influence, much less public reporting began to appear. And, secondly, many large corporations have IT subsidiaries, which, among other things, are also engaged in software development, the expert notes.

In our case, eXpress works not only on smartphones and tablets, but also on desktops. It is almost impossible to calculate how much mobile development is, "he explains. - Other vendors have the same situation - they also release mobile and desktop versions of products, plus the backend costs money.

In 2022, the business was in "standby mode," the companies tried to work with both iOS and Android - they did not expand, but did not greatly reduce projects, - comments Rinat Shamshutdinov, head of mobile development at SimbirSoft.

But I think that in the foreseeable future it will also come to mobile applications - most likely, this will happen in 2024, and we will see a surge in mass customer activity in the development of corporate mobility based on Russian software. On the other hand, today there are a number of processes that are pushing the business to start replacing mobile services. For example, the customer updates the server, and in this regard, mobile applications are also affected by it, because the specifics of mobile services are that they are connected to a large number of various business systems, servers, security systems, authentication. It is enough to move one thing, and everything begins to crumble like a house of cards, - comments Oleg Bachurin.

The general economic situation that has developed both in our country and around the world dictates very simple rules of the game for business - these are short planning periods, the desire to accumulate assets, short-term and low-risk investments. These trends are also driven by current IT development strategies, "he says. - Now, first of all, customers are interested in projects with a short development cycle and minimal investments. At the same time, the key priorities are efficiency and the real business effect of the implementation of these projects.

There is such a trend that more experienced developers have become more in demand, and beginners - on the contrary. And the reason for this is the active use of neural networks. It can be assumed that the same will happen in other specialties and areas, the expert states.

Previously, a large share of all developed applications were native applications for iOS/Android platforms: long-term support for such applications is easier and more stable, you can implement any technical tasks and get maximum performance without resorting to low-level solutions. Now, due to sanctions, the main problems for companies arose with the distribution and update of iOS applications and access to the App Store. The rest of the sanctions and restrictions did not greatly affect mobile development and the back of the system, - said Nikolai Nikolenko, technical director of KODE.

This is due to the desire to reduce the cost of development: if, with a native model, applications are developed separately for Android and iOS (and two working teams of specialists must be involved), then a cross-platform approach allows you to create a solution suitable for two operating systems at once - and costs are reduced, - explains Roman Romanov, head of the software development center of the company "Satel."

In recent years, a trend has developed in the Russian market, according to which leaks of data from customers of companies after hacking their applications led to significant reputational costs and a sharp decrease in user loyalty. According to statistics from Roskomnadzor, in 2022, about 150 incidents with leaks of customer data were recorded, and 83% of domestic applications have various vulnerabilities in terms of cybersecurity.

Some do not seek to protect information, and they are already doing well - they use ordinary applications from the App Store. Others need to protect information, and they are rather tough on the information security issue: "first protect, and only then corporate data will go to the application." These are two parallel paths, "he says.

First of all, this is the rejection of imported services. All foreign services that can leave the country at any time and stop working are trying to replace them with domestic counterparts. And thereby increase the stability of your business and minimize risks. In this regard, there is a tendency to develop its own Russian services - analogues of Western ones, - he says.

The market for Russian mobile applications will strive for technological sovereignty, but this is a long process. Large business and the public sector will try to maintain growth rates and gradually transfer their product to domestic software without losing the quality and speed of service.

To solve some corporate problems, they use a mobile platform from 1C. This development method is more suitable for companies whose work is based on the solutions of this vendor. At the same time, it is important to provide for possible risks and development prospects, - explains the expert SimbirSoft.

Previously, not all customers had an understanding that any development is an investment that should bring results and ultimately profit to the company. Now the number of such requests' so that it 'falls a lot, developed SOWs are now coming to the fore indicating the expected metrics, - explains the KODE expert.

Our company's portfolio of solutions includes several mobile applications that have been successfully running on iOS and Android for many years, but this year we are faced with a new challenge - the need to develop mobile applications based on the Russian Aurora operating system. The key difficulty was the lack of developers and programmers on the market with the necessary skills and relevant experience in developing based on the Aurora system, - comments Roman Romanov (Satel).

We have new tasks for the development of our product "Forsyth. Mobile platform, "- Oleg Bachurin (Forsyth) answers, - This year we plan to ensure the work of our product together with the Russian orchestrator. Our market has analogues of Western orchestrators, and we are now working on connecting a mobile platform with Russian software for orchestrating microservices. Large-scale work, in fact, we need to change the foundation - what everything is arranged on, from which everything begins to work.

Previously, Microsoft's Active Directory system has always been used on the Russian market - in 100% of cases, all our customers have this software. This system also maintains mobile user accounts. In our product "Forsyth. Mobile Platform "supports Active Directory, but now I understand that we will have to make additional connectors to AD substitutes very soon. And if earlier everyone used the same system, now customers can choose different options - most likely, several such solutions will be presented on the market, "he says.

We have finished working on a crypto container - now the eXpress application processes all data without VPN or individual information security solutions. We protect everything ourselves, and today we process both personal data and commercial secrets, - says Andrei Vratsky (eXpress), - We also released several superapps for the country's largest companies, which are especially important for security. We actually laid this road, and now the direction is developing at a galloping pace.

At first glance, the probabilistic approach does not look like a reliable tool, but as it turned out in practice, the networks trained in this way give outstanding results in the form of ready-made code. Such a code is even suitable for use on combat projects, the expert says.

This increases the competitiveness of the business. Many large applications have long used chatbots, personalized content, and this area will only develop, the expert is sure.

We already have several such projects where we use the ML tandem and Android mobile devices to solve the production problems of companies. And we see that the demand for such technologies is increasing, "he notes.

However, due to the fact that this approach is still relatively new, the community around it is not so large yet, and developers may encounter a problem without finding a solution in ready-made resources, "Andreev notes.

iOS 13 has its own reactive framework from Apple - Combine. iOS developers were already familiar with the reactive approach at this point, and with the release of Combine, many began to gradually implement it in their applications. Android developers are also familiar with the reactive approach. Around the same time as Combine, a tool called Kotlin Coroutines Flow from JetBrains was released, since then its development has continued, and more and more developers are starting to support it, "concludes Evgeny Andreev.

In general, cross-platform development of mobile applications is becoming more and more popular, as it reduces the cost of developing and supporting applications, ensures scalability and availability on different platforms, simplifies the deployment and update process, "says the head of mobile development at ADV.

It combined all the most necessary services for owners of loyalty cards: payment for parking, navigation through the shopping center, communication with a support service specialist. Plus, here you can track special promotions, accumulation of bonuses, upcoming events and events. The development took only two months, we used the React Native cross-platform framework. The application was simultaneously launched for both Android and iOS, seriously reducing the cost of the project, he says.

The launch of the mobile application allowed the company to achieve explosive growth in online sales, the mobile application accounts for 10% of the company's income, the number of transactions using the mobile application is 20%, and this figure continues to grow, he says.

For one of our real estate clients, we developed a mobile application for managing office space a few years ago. It was built entirely on an external SDK, which was created and accompanied by a Ukrainian team, "says Anton Kazenyuk (Globus IT).

We quickly found a Russian alternative to this SDK, but we had to overcome a number of difficulties in working with it. The library was not entirely similar, but quite acceptable for saving the functionality of the application. A huge amount of work was done. In particular, most of the application had to be rewritten, since two different SDKs use different approaches. We used ChatGPT to convert legacy code, to create new code, tests, etc., "says Anton Kazenyuk (Globus IT).